When Paul left Athens, he went to Corinth. There he met a couple of Christians from a Jewish background named Aquila and Priscilla. Aquila had been born in Pontus, and they had recently come to Corinth from Italy because the Roman emperor Claudius had commanded all the Jews to depart from Rome. Paul came to them, stayed with them, and worked together with them because they were all tentmakers by occupation. During this time, Paul also reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath and persuaded a number of both Jews and Greeks.

Silas and Timothy finally arrived from Macedonia to rejoin Paul in Corinth, and together they preached Jesus as the Christ. However, the Jewish leaders opposed them and blasphemed. So Paul told them that from then on he would preach primarily to the Gentiles and made his base of operations the house of Justus who lived right next to the synagogue. As a result, even Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed, and many other Corinthians also believed and were baptized.

The Lord spoke to Paul by a vision at night to encourage him, and he continued in Corinth for a year and six months. Gallio was the proconsul or Roman governor, and the unbelieving Jews brought Paul before him with a charge of violations of Jewish law. Paul was about to defend himself. However, Gallio said that if it were a criminal matter, he would have listened, but since it was a question of Jewish law, he would not hear it. So he dismissed the charge. Then the Greeks beat Sosthenes, who is called the ruler of the synagogue. Either he replaced Crispus and apparently also later became a Christian, or they are two names for the same person, but Paul mentions both individuals (1 Corinthians 1:1, 14).

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” (Psalm 133:1). Unity among God’s people is something that is emphasized over and over in the scripture. Of course, it must be understood that this is not merely unity for the sake of being united; rather, the basis for this unity is a common acceptance of the truth of God’s word (John 17:17). There were times in Israel’s history when those who were supposed to be God’s people seemed united, but it was a unity in following unrighteousness and it finally led to their destruction. That is why we are warned to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness (Ephesians 5:11).

The Psalmist describes the beauty of godly unity as “like the precious oil upon the head, running down on the beard, the beard of Aaron” (v. 2). Sometimes, especially in the winter, I let my beard grow out, although I doubt that it has ever gotten as long as Aaron’s probably was. Somehow, in our western minds, the picture of oil running down the head and dripping off the beard of someone is not necessarily a pretty one. However, it evidently was to the ancient Israelites. Thus, the Psalmist uses this vision to emphasize the fact that unity is a desirable goal. And having been through a few, not many but enough to form a conclusion about them, good church fights, I would heartily agree!

Jesus prayed for the oneness or unity of all who believe on Him through the apostles’ word (John 17:20-21). The denominational division among supposed believers is a scandal that gives the unbelieving world fuel for their criticism of Christianity. When division reared its ugly head in the church at Corinth, Paul commanded the brethren there “that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:10). The Bible gives us God’s plan for unity in Ephesians 4:1-16 and tells us that we should be “endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (v. 3). Yes, Biblical unity is something that is good and pleasant.

William Alexander McCauley (February 14, 1917-May 18, 1999) was a Canadian composer , music educator , conductor , arranger, pianist, administrator, and trombonist . He was born at Tofield, near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on Feb. 14, 1917, receiving his first piano lessons in his hometown and in Edmonton. At the age of 16 he founded his own dance band in Tofield, that worked locally and was broadcast on CFRN, Edmonton, and began his musical studies in 1936 at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Glenn Gould School in Toronto. Between 1936 and 1940 he also worked as an arranger, pianist, and trombonist with Horace Lapp. During World War II he served as a musician in a military band, pilot, and flight instructor in the Royal Canadian Air Force and later became second conductor of the Toronto Manning Pool Band. After the war he continued his studies at the Conservatory in Toronto and received his Bachelor of Music in 1947. His teachers there Healey Willan (composition ), Leo Smith ( harmony), Margaret Parsons ( piano ), Harry Hawe and Rudolph Baumler (trombone).

From 1947 to 1949 McCauley was a lecturer and conductor at the Ottawa Technical High School. In addition, he was a trombone player in the orchestra of the National Film Board of Canada, perhaps helping to explain his extensive output of film music, and the Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra. Then became music director with Crawley Films from 1949 to 1957. He also played in the Harmony Symphony Orchestra and worked with Trump Davidson , Art Hallman, and Ellis McLintock. His best-known work, Five Miniatures for flute and string orchestra, comes from 1958. Later he studied at the renowned Eastman School of Music in Rochester with Alan Hovhaness , Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson and graduated as Master of Music in 1959. Privately he studied conducting in Maine with Pierre Monteux . He also completed his studies at the Eastman School of Music and obtained a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in 1960.

From 1960 to 1987 McCauley was house music director at the O’Keefe Centre, now the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, in Toronto. At the same time he was working for other organizations and institutions. He was from 1961 to 1969, music director at York University in Toronto and director of the York University Choir, which under his leadership in 1967 won the “City of Lincoln Trophy.” That year also saw performances of McCauley’s Fantasy on Canadian Folk Songs on Parliament Hill, and of Plus One at Expo ’67. From 1970 to 1978 he was music director of Seneca College in Toronto from 1972 to 1988 and director of the North York Symphony Orchestra. After his retirement he became honorary conductor and honorary president of the orchestra.

McCauley was a prolific and versatile composer. He wrote more than 125 works for movies and conducted a large number of them himself. He also wrote music for television productions and commercial establishments and conducted around 200 recording sessions for films, television, and recordings. Highlights of his film music include the score for the CBC-TV series The Whiteoaks of Jalna (1972), and for the feature films The Neptune Factor (1973), Sunday in the Country (1973), and It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (1975). McCauley also wrote the score for the CBC-TV historical drama Riel (1979). In 1998 the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) awarded him with the Lifetime Achievement Award for Film and Television Music award, which was presented for the first time. His son Matthew McCauley (born 1954) is a working composer and producer.

Early in his career McCauley developed the adaptable and eclectic style necessary for incidental composition, and he remained a composer without a school. Folk tunes figure in several of his orchestral works, as do elements of jazz. His Concerto Grosso (1973) is neoclassical, lyrical, and rhythmic. In his music generally dissonance is counteracted by appealing rhythms, cohesive counterpoint, and an uncomplicated sense of direction. Some of his short piano pieces have been used as pedagogical material. Several of his concert works have been recorded. In the 1990s, McCauley continued to work as a freelance composer and conductor. He was an associate of the Canadian Music Centre. Dr. William McCauley passed away on May 18, 1999, at Alliston, Ontario, Canada.

The following work by William A. McCauley is contained in my collection:

Five Miniatures for Flute and Strings

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources

The Nov. 11, 2011, edition of Crosswalk.com’s Homeschool Update e-newsletter had an article by Amelia Harper taken from The Old Schoolhouse magazine entitled “Eight Common Myths About Homeschooling in High School.”

It begins:

For most homeschooling parents, teaching children during the elementary years is comparatively easy. Basically, you just need to be smarter than a fifth-grader—right? But as your student-child enters the high school years, many homeschool parents are faced with a difficult choice—do we continue on the homeschool path or send our child to a more traditional school environment?

To add to the confusion, there are a great many myths about homeschooling in high school. We will address some of these myths below in an attempt to help you as you make this all-important decision. There is no one answer for all students. Some parents even make the individual choice to send some children to school during the high school years while keeping others at home. However, the truth about homeschooling during high school can make the decision much easier for those who are uncertain.

Joan Tower (born September 6, 1938) is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist,. and conductor. Born at New Rochelle, NY, in 1938, Tower moved to the South American nation of Bolivia when she was nine years old, an experience which she credits for making rhythm an integral part of her work. For the next decade Tower’s talent in music, particularly on the piano, grew rapidly due to her father’s insistence that she benefit from consistent musical training. Tower’s relationship with her mineralogist father is visible in many aspects of her work, most specifically her “mineral works” (including Black Topaz (1976) and Silver Ladders (1986). She returned to the United States as a young woman to study music, first at Bennington College, in Vermont, and then at Columbia University where she studied under Otto Luening, Jack Beeson, and Vladimir Ussachevsky and was awarded her doctorate in composition in 1968.

In 1969 Tower, along with violinist Joel Lester and flautist Patricia Spencer, founded the New York based Da Capo Chamber Players where she served as the group’s pianist. In 1972 Tower accepted a faculty position at Bard College in composition, a post she continues to hold today. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1976. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s Tower wrote a number of successful works for the Da Capo Players, including Platinum Spirals(1976), Amazon I (1977) and Wings (1981). Though the group won several awards in its early years, including the Naumburg Award in 1973, Tower left the group in 1984, buoyed by the immediate success of her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles. In 1985, a year after leaving the Da Capo Players, Tower accepted a position at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1988-1991 where she was a composer-in-residence.

Tower became the first woman recipient of the Grawemeyer Award (Music Composition), awarded by the University of Louisville for her composition “Silver Ladders” in 1990, a piece she wrote for the St. Louis Symphony. In 1993, under commission from the Milwaukee Ballet, Tower composed Stepping Stones, a selection from which she would go on to conduct at the White House. Other compositions from the 1990s include the third Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, several piano concertos–notably 1996’s Rapids (Piano Concerto no. 2) and Tambor (1998) written for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In 1998 Tower won the Delaware Symphony’s prestigious Alfred I. DuPont Award for Distinguished American Composer, and in 1999 she accepted a position as composer-in-residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

In 2002 Tower won the Annual Composer’s Award from the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Symphony. During the 2003-2004 season two new works were debuted, DNA, a percussion quintet commissioned for Frank Epstein, and Incandescent. In 2004 the Pittsburgh Symphony’s recording of Tambor, Made in America, and Concerto for Orchestra earned a Grammy nomination. In 2004 Carnegie Hall’s “Making Music” series featured a retrospective of Tower’s body of work, performed by artists including the Tokyo String Quartet and pianists Melvin Chen and Ursula Oppens.

In 2005 Tower became the first composer commissioned for the “Ford Made in America” program, the only project of its kind to involve smaller-budget orchestras as commissioning agents of new work by major composers, in which her 15 minute Made in America was performed in every state of the union during the 2005-2007 season. In 2008, Tower’s Made in America and the recording of it by the Nashville Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin won three Grammy Awards: in the categories Best Orchestral Performance, Best Classical Album and Best Classical Contemporary Composition. She is currently the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and serves on the Artistic Advisory panel of the BMI Foundation. Another orchestra residency was with the Pittsburgh Symphony (2010-2011). She was the Albany Symphony’s Mentor Composer partner in the 2013-14 season.

Tower’s early music seems to reflect the influences of her mentors at Columbia University and is rooted in the serialist tradition, whose sparse texture complimented her interest in chamber music. As she developed as a composer Tower began to gravitate towards the work of Olivier Messiaen and George Crumb and broke away from the strict serialist model. Her work became more colorful and has often been described as impressionistic. She often composes with specific ensembles or soloists in mind, and aims to exploit the strengths of these performers in her composition. Lauded by the New Yorker as “one of the most successful woman composers of all time,” Tower is widely regarded as one of the most important American composers living today, and her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world.

My collection includes the following work by Joan Tower:

Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources

John Lee Clayton Jr. (born August 20, 1952) is an American jazz and classical double bassist and composer. He was born on August 20, 1952, at Venice, CA. He began his bass career in elementary school playing in strings class, junior orchestra, high school jazz band, orchestra, and soul/R&B groups. In 1969, at the age of 16, he began seriously undertaking the study of double bass by enrolling in legendary bassist Ray Brown’s jazz class at UCLA, beginning a close relationship that lasted more than three decades. By age 19, Clayton had become a bassist on Henry Mancini’s television series The Mancini Generation and later graduated in 1975 from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music with a degree in bass performance.

After his graduation, Clayton toured with the Monty Alexander Trio (1975-77), the Count Basie Orchestra (1977-79), and settled in as principal bassist with the Amsterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in Amsterdam, Netherlands (1980-85). He was also a bass instructor at The Royal Conservatory, The Hague, Holland from 1980-83. However, after five years he returned to the U.S. for a break from the classical genre to work more towards jazz and jazz composition, so in 1985 he returned to California, co-founded the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, with his saxophonist brother Jeff Clayton and drummer Jeff Hamilton. He and his brother also founded The Clayton Brothers quintet which has featured noted instrumentalists such as Bill Cunliffe and Terell Stafford, and taught part-time bass at Cal State Long Beach, UCLA and USC.

In 1988 Clayton joined the faculty of the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where he taught until 2009. From 1999 to 2001 he served as Artistic Director of the Jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic program at the Hollywood Bowl and has also conducted the All-Alaska Jazz Band. Now, in addition to individual clinics, workshops, and private students as schedule permits, John also directs the educational components associated with the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, Centrum Festival, Sarasota Jazz Festival, Santa Fe Jazz Party, Jazz Port Townsend Summer Workshop, and Vail Jazz Party, and presides as president over the 1,500 member International Bassists Society (IBS). He has composed and/or arranged for such notable artists as The Count Basie Orchestra, Diana Krall, Whitney Houston, Carmen McRae, Nancy Wilson, Joe Williams, Ernestine Anderson, Quincy Jones, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Natalie Cole, and The Tonight Show Band.

Career highlights include arranging the ‘Star Spangled Banner” for Whitney Houston’s performance at Super Bowl 1990 (the recording went platinum), playing bass on Paul McCartney’s CD “Kisses On The Bottom,” arranging and playing bass with Yo-Yo Ma and Friends on “Songs of Joy and Peace,” arranging playing and conducting the 2009 CD “Charles Aznavour With the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra,” and numerous recordings with Diana Krall, the Clayton Brothers, Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, Milt Jackson, Monty Alexander, et al. Clayton’s son, Gerald Clayton, is an accomplished jazz pianist, placing second in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition in 2006. In 2007, John Clayton won a Grammy for Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s): “I’m Gonna Live Till I Die,” (Queen Latifah) John Clayton, arranger.

In December 2009 Brother To Brother by The Clayton Brothers received a Grammy nomination in the Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group category. John was interviewed by Linus Wyrsch on “The Jazz Hole” for breakthruradio.com in September 2013. Clayton has been commissioned by many ensembles including the Northwest Chamber Orchestra, the American Jazz Philharmonic, The Iceland Symphony, The Metropole Orchestra, The Carnegie Hall Big Band, The Richmond Symphony, the WDR Orchestra, and the Amsterdam Philharmonic. John has won numerous awards such as the Golden Feather Award, and the Los Angeles Jazz Society’s Composer/Arranger award. Most recently, John won another Grammy for his arrangements on Queen Latifah’s, Trav’lin’ Light.

The following work by John Clayton is contained in my collection:

Open Me First

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (August 15, 1875–September 1, 1912) was an English composer of Creole descent who achieved such success that he was once called the “African Mahler.” He was born on August 15, 1875 in Holborn, London, England to Alice Hare Martin (1856–1953), an English woman, and Dr. Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a Creole from Sierra Leone, of mixed European and African descent. Daniel Taylor returned to Africa in1875. Alice Martin named her son Samuel Coleridge Taylor after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his mother and grandfather called the boy Coleridge Taylor. Taylor was brought up in Croydon by his mother and her father Benjamin Holmans, who played the violin and gave Coleridge-Taylor his first music lessons, teaching him the various elementary positions on the instrument, and later a stepfather George William Evans. For about eight years, the boy attended a school called the British School on Tamworth Road near his home.

Martin’s brother was a professional musician. Taylor studied the violin at the Royal College of Music and composition under Charles Villiers Stanford beginning in September of 1890 at age fifteen. He also taught, soon being appointed a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music; and conducted the orchestra at the Croydon Conservatoire. The young man later used the name “Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,” with a hyphen, said to be following a printer’s typographical error. His father Daniel Taylor was later appointed as coroner for the British Empire in The Gambia in the late 1890s. Holmans died in 1896. By 1896, Coleridge-Taylor was already earning a reputation as a composer, writing his Symphony in A Minor in 1896. He was later helped by Edward Elgar, who recommended him to the Three Choirs Festival. His Ballade in A minor was premiered there. His early work was also guided by the influential music editor and critic August Jaeger of music publisher Novello; he told Elgar that Taylor was “a genius.”

On the strength of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, which was conducted by Stanford at its 1898 premiere and proved to be highly popular, Coleridge-Taylor made three tours of the United States. The composer soon followed Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast with two other cantatas about Hiawatha, The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha’s Departure; all three were published together, along with an Overture, as The Song of Hiawatha, Op. 30. In 1899 Coleridge-Taylor married Jessie Walmisley, a pianist whom he had met as a fellow student at the RCM. Jessie had left the college in 1893. Her parents objected to the marriage because Taylor was of mixed-race parentage. The couple had a son, named Hiawatha (1900–1980) after a Native American immortalised in poetry, and a daughter Gwendolyn (1903–1998). Later their daughter took the name Avril and became a conductor-composer in her own right.

Coleridge-Taylor became increasingly interested in his paternal racial and was the youngest delegate at the 1900 First Pan-African Conference held in London. In 1904, he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, a rare honor in those days for a man of African descent. Coleridge-Taylor sought to do for traditional African music what Johannes Brahms did for Hungarian music and Antonín Dvořák for Bohemian music. Having met the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in London, Taylor set some of his poems to music. A joint recital between Taylor and Dunbar was arranged in London, under the patronage of U. S. Ambassador John Milton Hay. It was organized by Henry Francis Downing, an African-American playwright and London resident. Dunbar and other black people encouraged Coleridge-Taylor to draw from his Sierra Leonean ancestry and the music of the African continent.

Coleridge-Taylor was 37 when he died of double pneumonia on September 1, 1912, a few days after collapsing at West Croydon railway station due to exhaustion from overwork. He was buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery, Wallington, Surrey, today in the London Borough of Sutton. King George V granted Jessie Coleridge-Taylor, the young widow, an annual pension of £100, evidence of the high regard in which the composer was held. In 1912 a memorial concert was held at the Royal Albert Hall and garnered £300 for the composer’s family. Coleridge-Taylor left a large and varied body of music, both vocal and instrumental. His greatest success was undoubtedly his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, which was widely performed by choral groups in England during his lifetime and in the decades after his death. His reputation has suffered in recent years, although at one time his music enjoyed considerable popularity in England.

Coleridge-Taylor also composed chamber music, anthems, and the African Dances for violin, among other works which often included African, Afro-American, and Afro-Caribbean elements in melody and in title. The Petite Suite de Concert, an orchestral suite of ballet music arranged from Hiawatha, is still regularly played. He set one poem by his near-namesake Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Legend of Kubla Khan, and he composed a violin concerto for the American violinist Maud Powell. Coleridge-Taylor’s only large-scale operatic work, Thelma, was long believed to have been lost, but while researching for a PhD on the life and music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Catherine Carr unearthed the manuscripts of Thelma in the British Library.

My collection includes the following works by Samuel Taylor-Coleridge:

African Suite, op. 35 (1898): Danse Negre, #4.

Petite Suite de Concert, op. 77 (1910).

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources